5 ms·

The Genius of Learning

90 points by noyesno 10y ago

danharaj 10y ago
Reminds me of wéi wú wéi, the mystical Daoist concept. It literally means "action without action". My favorite story that illustrates the concept is the anecdote about the skillful butcher in Zhuangzi: Cook Ting was cutting up an ox for Lord Wen-hui. At every touch of his hand, every heave of his shoulder, every move of his feet, every thrust of his knee — zip! zoop! He slithered the knife along with a zing, and all was in perfect rhythm, as though he were performing the dance of the Mulberry Grove or keeping time to the Ching-shou music. “Ah, this is marvelous!” said Lord Wen-hui. “Imagine skill reaching such heights!” Cook Ting laid down his knife and replied, “What I care about is the Way, which goes beyond skill. When I first began cutting up oxen, all I could see was the ox itself. After three years I no longer saw the whole ox. And now — now I go at it by spirit and don’t look with my eyes. Perception and understanding have come to a stop and spirit moves where it wants. I go along with the natural makeup, strike in the big hollows, guide the knife through the big openings, and following things as they are. So I never touch the smallest ligament or tendon, much less a main joint. “A good cook changes his knife once a year — because he cuts. A mediocre cook changes his knife once a month — because he hacks. I’ve had this knife of mine for nineteen years and I’ve cut up thousands of oxen with it, and yet the blade is as good as though it had just come from the grindstone. There are spaces between the joints, and the blade of the knife has really no thickness. If you insert what has no thickness into such spaces, then there’s plenty of room — more than enough for the blade to play about it. That’s why after nineteen years the blade of my knife is still as good as when it first came from the grindstone. “However, whenever I come to a complicated place, I size up the difficulties, tell myself to watch out and be careful, keep my eyes on what I’m doing, work very slowly, and move the knife with the greatest subtlety, until — flop! the whole thing comes apart like a clod of earth crumbling to the ground. I stand there holding the knife and look all around me, completely satisfied and reluctant to move on, and then I wipe off the knife and put it away.” “Excellent!” said Lord Wen-hui. “I have heard the words of Cook Ting and learned how to care for life!” (translation by Burton Watson, my particular favorite)
- Jugurtha 10y ago
  “A good cook changes his knife once a year — because he cuts. A mediocre cook changes his knife once a month — because he hacks. I’ve had this knife of mine for nineteen years and I’ve cut up thousands of oxen with it, and yet the blade is as good as though it had just come from the grindstone. There are spaces between the joints, and the blade of the knife has really no thickness. If you insert what has no thickness into such spaces, then there’s plenty of room — more than enough for the blade to play about it. That’s why after nineteen years the blade of my knife is still as good as when it first came from the grindstone." “However, whenever I come to a complicated place, I size up the difficulties, tell myself to watch out and be careful, keep my eyes on what I’m doing, work very slowly, and move the knife with the greatest subtlety, until — flop! the whole thing comes apart like a clod of earth crumbling to the ground. I stand there holding the knife and look all around me, completely satisfied and reluctant to move on, and then I wipe off the knife and put it away.” Exactly this. You can skin and cut a whole sheep to pieces with a small knife while others sweat profusely using a meat axe and a saw and you can do it faster. If something moves, it can be cut where it moves. Spaces between vertebrae and ribs. Articulations. The bit about the state of the knife is also true: My father has French and German bayonets from WWI and WWII. You have to be very careful near those things.
  - westoncb 10y ago
    This part of the passage stuck out to me also. My read on it is that what enables the subject of the story to guide his knife so well is: human attention is a finite resource and it's typically divided up among many things, and, the more attention allocated to something the more rich its representation in consciousness. If you have some variation in success watching your breath in meditation, you'll notice an astonishing range of detail that your breath might be represented with. When you are distracted, it might barely register as the symbol, "feeling of breath"; and if you have nothing else on your mind, you can have a super rich, fully continuous experience of it moving in and out, with all the gradations of temperature at different points etc. Seems not very useful with breath watching, but if you carry this over to a sport or other skill, it's amazing how much more time it seems you have to act, and how many subtleties about the playing field that are otherwise totally filtered out. I can imagine the butcher feeling every little difference in density of the meat as his knife moves along, anticipating where it will give or catch and always remaining on a smooth track.
irickt 10y ago
direct link, on the cartoonist's site: http://www.laurenweinstein.com/#/genius-of-learning/ http://www.laurenweinstein.com/#/genius-of-learning/
- AceJohnny2 10y ago
  Unrelated to Lauren Weinstein, the privacy activist: https://lauren.vortex.com/ https://lauren.vortex.com/
mannykannot 10y ago
"...but as people mastered the task, the systems [of the brain] stopped communicating. It turned out that people who could disengage these systems the fastest were also the best learners." This may just be an artifact of the presentation, or my misreading of it, but from then on it seems to be assumed that fast learning is a consequence of fast disengagement, rather than the other way around, yet no evidence is offered here that explicitly supports this interpretation over the alternative.
- marmaduke 10y ago
  It's a cartoon, dude.
- plurinshael 10y ago
  I assumed there was quite a bit of research and Hegelian synthesis that occurred outside of the narrative.
jotto 10y ago
reminds me of "The Inner Game" - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12520444 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12520444
zodPod 10y ago
I feel like the format makes this really hard to read through. It'd be much easier to read as a blog post.

90 points by noyesno 10y ago

Reminds me of wéi wú wéi, the mystical Daoist concept. It literally means "action without action". My favorite story that illustrates the concept is the anecdote about the skillful butcher in Zhuangzi: Cook Ting was cutting up an ox for Lord Wen-hui. At every touch of his hand, every heave of his shoulder, every move of his feet, every thrust of his knee — zip! zoop! He slithered the knife along with a zing, and all was in perfect rhythm, as though he were performing the dance of the Mulberry Grove or keeping time to the Ching-shou music. “Ah, this is marvelous!” said Lord Wen-hui. “Imagine skill reaching such heights!” Cook Ting laid down his knife and replied, “What I care about is the Way, which goes beyond skill. When I first began cutting up oxen, all I could see was the ox itself. After three years I no longer saw the whole ox. And now — now I go at it by spirit and don’t look with my eyes. Perception and understanding have come to a stop and spirit moves where it wants. I go along with the natural makeup, strike in the big hollows, guide the knife through the big openings, and following things as they are. So I never touch the smallest ligament or tendon, much less a main joint. “A good cook changes his knife once a year — because he cuts. A mediocre cook changes his knife once a month — because he hacks. I’ve had this knife of mine for nineteen years and I’ve cut up thousands of oxen with it, and yet the blade is as good as though it had just come from the grindstone. There are spaces between the joints, and the blade of the knife has really no thickness. If you insert what has no thickness into such spaces, then there’s plenty of room — more than enough for the blade to play about it. That’s why after nineteen years the blade of my knife is still as good as when it first came from the grindstone. “However, whenever I come to a complicated place, I size up the difficulties, tell myself to watch out and be careful, keep my eyes on what I’m doing, work very slowly, and move the knife with the greatest subtlety, until — flop! the whole thing comes apart like a clod of earth crumbling to the ground. I stand there holding the knife and look all around me, completely satisfied and reluctant to move on, and then I wipe off the knife and put it away.” “Excellent!” said Lord Wen-hui. “I have heard the words of Cook Ting and learned how to care for life!” (translation by Burton Watson, my particular favorite)

Jugurtha 10y ago
“A good cook changes his knife once a year — because he cuts. A mediocre cook changes his knife once a month — because he hacks. I’ve had this knife of mine for nineteen years and I’ve cut up thousands of oxen with it, and yet the blade is as good as though it had just come from the grindstone. There are spaces between the joints, and the blade of the knife has really no thickness. If you insert what has no thickness into such spaces, then there’s plenty of room — more than enough for the blade to play about it. That’s why after nineteen years the blade of my knife is still as good as when it first came from the grindstone." “However, whenever I come to a complicated place, I size up the difficulties, tell myself to watch out and be careful, keep my eyes on what I’m doing, work very slowly, and move the knife with the greatest subtlety, until — flop! the whole thing comes apart like a clod of earth crumbling to the ground. I stand there holding the knife and look all around me, completely satisfied and reluctant to move on, and then I wipe off the knife and put it away.” Exactly this. You can skin and cut a whole sheep to pieces with a small knife while others sweat profusely using a meat axe and a saw and you can do it faster. If something moves, it can be cut where it moves. Spaces between vertebrae and ribs. Articulations. The bit about the state of the knife is also true: My father has French and German bayonets from WWI and WWII. You have to be very careful near those things.
- westoncb 10y ago
  This part of the passage stuck out to me also. My read on it is that what enables the subject of the story to guide his knife so well is: human attention is a finite resource and it's typically divided up among many things, and, the more attention allocated to something the more rich its representation in consciousness. If you have some variation in success watching your breath in meditation, you'll notice an astonishing range of detail that your breath might be represented with. When you are distracted, it might barely register as the symbol, "feeling of breath"; and if you have nothing else on your mind, you can have a super rich, fully continuous experience of it moving in and out, with all the gradations of temperature at different points etc. Seems not very useful with breath watching, but if you carry this over to a sport or other skill, it's amazing how much more time it seems you have to act, and how many subtleties about the playing field that are otherwise totally filtered out. I can imagine the butcher feeling every little difference in density of the meat as his knife moves along, anticipating where it will give or catch and always remaining on a smooth track.

irickt 10y ago

direct link, on the cartoonist's site: http://www.laurenweinstein.com/#/genius-of-learning/ http://www.laurenweinstein.com/#/genius-of-learning/

AceJohnny2 10y ago
Unrelated to Lauren Weinstein, the privacy activist: https://lauren.vortex.com/ https://lauren.vortex.com/

mannykannot 10y ago

"...but as people mastered the task, the systems [of the brain] stopped communicating. It turned out that people who could disengage these systems the fastest were also the best learners." This may just be an artifact of the presentation, or my misreading of it, but from then on it seems to be assumed that fast learning is a consequence of fast disengagement, rather than the other way around, yet no evidence is offered here that explicitly supports this interpretation over the alternative.

marmaduke 10y ago
It's a cartoon, dude.
plurinshael 10y ago
I assumed there was quite a bit of research and Hegelian synthesis that occurred outside of the narrative.

jotto 10y ago

reminds me of "The Inner Game" - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12520444 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12520444

zodPod 10y ago

I feel like the format makes this really hard to read through. It'd be much easier to read as a blog post.